Meru Launches Wireless Service Assurance

Wireless LAN maker Meru Networks has added a clever tweak to its enterprise product that should cut service desk effort by measuring wireless performance.

Office wireless LANs can cause support headaches because laptops may fail to connect for many different reasons. Network staff can spend hours looking for a network problem when the fault is in the laptop, the wireless card or its drivers.

With Meru’s Service Assurance Manager one of the wireless access points on the network can emulate a laptop client. This can then be used to test the wireless provision of other access points – giving a closed loop and letting support staff be proactive.

“More than 90 percent of the time, when the user complains that the wireless LAN isn’t available it is actually a problem with the client,” said Rachna Ahlawat, marketing vice president of Meru. “We need to take the client out of the equation and still do the test.”

Meru is better placed than other vendors to offer this sort of feature, she said, because it uses a “channel blanket” where all access points are on the same radio frequency. It’s therefore easy for one AP to spend part of its time acting as a client to test the others, without interrupting the wireless service.

The support costs of wireless are sometimes overlooked, and climb fast when the wireless LAN is expanded. “Our recent research has shown that top-performing organisations doubled their WLAN coverage area, which resulted in a 63 percent increase in the cost of managing the WLAN and a 69 percent increase in the number of employees required to support it,” said Andrew Borg, senior research analyst for Aberdeen Group.

SAM can emulate a variety of clients (including the behaviour of specific software drivers) using a number of different Wi-Fi variations. It also generates reports which can be used as evidence of service delivery within organisations where reporting is required.

It is available as a software upgrade for Meru’s existing network management appliance, costing around $25000 (£15,735) for a 100 AP network

Although times have been tough for wireless LAN vendors, Meru claims to be going from strength to strength, and all vendors predict a growth folliwing the eventual ratification of the fast 802.11n Wi-fi standard. Other vendors including Aruba and Zyxel have concentrated on producing lower cost offerings to meet the needs of users in a recession.